CogBlogged Tagged ‘dog’s eye view’

My first day on the ground at SXSW- a conference on a Texas sized scale! The Austin convention center is a massive city. Early notes- they are really organized with staff and helpful people every step of the way trough registration; only took about 12 minutes to move through long line. Double bonus points because after your badge, you go elsewhere to get the program and the schwag bag… but you can come back later to get the bag, you dont have to lug it around (thanks to tip from Christene who I met in line). My bummer is this morning my trusty Canon PowerShot seemed to have powered up in my pocket and jammed the optics. I can only shoot in Digital Macro mode. Crikies! Okay, first panel session on Filching Design: When the Shoe Fits with Skip Baney (Apple), Lindsay Simon (Google), and Luke Wroblewski (LukeW Design/Yahoo). First [...]

I owe Chris Lott this blog post, having watched him this week grow tired of the PLE flak, bust out a brawl at the twitter bar, and then for me, state clearly what his interest was (he probably said it much earlier, but I miss things). So I get it, now, he wants to have a sense of what people do, use for tools in the network, how we go about doing it. A Personal Learning Environment (PLE) is not a thing, so I cannot keep railing about it only being diagrams. Good. But I wont even tray to sketch it out, because for me, it is n-dimensional and defies mapping in 2-D. But I still groan over the name. The environment I learn from, exist in, is not per se a “Learning Environment” – it has no such boundaries- it is my network I do learn from, but the [...]

With Brian’s announcement that Gardner Campbell is visiting Vancouver this week (shucks, wish I could have extended the stay another week… or forever), I remain tickled at the shelf life of my silly graphic there– and more so that Gardner even sometimes refers to himself as “Dr Glu”. These were from a series of images I created for the so called “Fish Tacos” Beyond the Blog session Brian and did at EDUCAUSE ELI in 2006. Somehow we got on this train of doing a Science Fiction flavor (yes, we did wear foil hats for this presentation) and is really among the most favorite collaborations I have done– we did the whole presentation via flickr along with some creepy sci fi music Brian fished out of the mysterious place he finds weird sounds (we had people coming in asking us to turn it off, so it was effective). I got on [...]

An aspect if blogging I find essential is shying away from a “please the world” view, meaning stepping out on limbs, and thus sometimes, being outright foolish, wrong, even “stupid”. And I welcome being called on my shit. So sometimes, or often, I spout something before thinking it through. So here is my public service for showing there is no harm in doing something stupid. And this is much more likely to happen in the fire-aim-ready world of twitter. So today, I caught wind of a few folks, like Cole, suggesting people take another look at the “other” twitter, Pownce, where I barked back I was just being a smart-ass. And not really thinking of aiming it Cole’s way, it was more on a string of comments I usually get when I post some gripe when twitter is down. They usually go like, “Twitter stinks! Lets have everyone go over [...]

I love you commenters. You make the blog go round. Following up on the last “story” post about an old electric guitar, Cole alertly noticed I’ve been playing around with my writing both here and in my flickr stream with some extended personal yarns (David’s Chair. Seeing the Door). Yes, its my blog and I can switch my topics, though I am not sure any more what is on topic or off topics. Especially in my flickr stuff, I’ve been giving a lot of thought to weaving more thoughtful (or at least intended that way) text than just a caption or, as I remarked in my recent talks, enough of these hastily posted photos where the only context is a title like “IMG10253.JPG”. There is some curiously interesting, for me, energy with not just including a picture as an illustration but weaving words and images into some combination, making the [...]

At the Northern Voice Tiki party, Scott Leslie wowed us (well I was wowed) with his rendition of a poem only geeks could grok, called “Trackback Love”. I grabbed some video with my little Canon Powershot- the lighting is awful but the audio is not bad. Trackback Love (3.4 Mb Quicktime 1:42)

Do you want to have fewer blog readers? Are you tired of pesky commenters who disagree with your posts? Is there something to be gained by frustrating users? Here’s how… Just set up your blog so users have to create accounts and log in to post a comment. Heck, they already have 50 gazillion accounts, what is one more? And by the time the poor fools actually wade through a registration form, wait for an email.. they have forgotten what they wanted to criticize you on! And, for an extra added, evil twist.. never email them the password! Brilliant! You will be free of readers in no time. I just had this lovely experience and could not wait to pull out the canine teeth… Okay, so this post on “Henry Jenkins on Emerging Technologies” parrots the list of topics from the 2008 NMC Horizon Report. But the author has a [...]

My oft repeated line this year is something about most enjoying the net based things that happen totally without provocation, plan, just spontaneous connectedness. I am sure that its maybe 3% of the general population that can really experience this with wide eyed excited wonder, and I am fortunate to know some of the best among that percentage. I was setting down to shoot down some emals, perhaps edit those audios I need to publish soon, like yesterday, and as the habit goes, I said, “I’ll just check twitter quickly, just a minute to scroll.” And there, in the 5 seconds ago, I saw Jen was linking to a ustream.tv channel she was broadcasting on. I’d not done hardly any ustreaming since my trip to Australia, and said, hey, I wonder how it works if you have multiple people broadcasting? So I flipped on my channel and we could pretty [...]

It’s been about a week since I launched this year’s week of no blogging / only commenting. This is hardly an exact, precise activity, and I am honored by the wide range of incoming links (the non spam variety, of course). So according to coComment, I posted 57 comments this week, admittedly a lot were on flickr- but they count, right? Of course no one has caught on that this is my twisted devious plot to escape coming up with something to blog for a week, right? Just run around and drop comments elsewhere. Maybe it could be a month… So if I was a proper academic or researcher, I might have some grand conclusion to postulate here, something bullet-point worthy. Nada. To be honest, it is less to discover any grand theory. I recognize how powerful it is when I get a legit comment, and this is my way [...]

It’s been a while since I barked about the clumsiness of LinkedIn but just had another one of those near deaths by lame interface design. But before that, i am still trying to fathom what LinkedIn offers beyond the ability to just link. It seems utterly recursive with no ending condition to stop the loop. I am sure I am missing the supreme benefit, and get tripped up by their spurious claims of benefit. But the cart is getting ahead of the dog and we are barreling down a steep grade…